work, this does not at all mean that the work may also be a work without preservers. Being a work, it always remains tied to preservers, even and particularly when it is still only waiting for them, only pleading and persevering for them to enter into its truth. Even the oblivion into which the work can sink is not nothing; it is still a preservation. It feeds on the work. Preserving the work means standing within the openness of beings that happens in the work. This "standing-within" of preservation, {GA 5: 55} however, is a knowing. Yet knowing does not consist in mere information and notions about something. He who truly knows beings knows what he wills to do in the midst of them.
The willing here referred to, which neither merely applies knowledge nor decides beforehand, is thought in terms of the basic experience of thinking in Being and Time. Knowing that remains a willing, and willing that remains a knowing, is the existing human being's ecstatic entry into the unconcealment of Being. The resoluteness intended in Being and Time is not the deliberate action of a subject but the opening up of human being, out of its captivity in beings, to the openness of Being.* However, in existence, man does not proceed from some inside to some outside; rather, the essence of Existenz is out-standing standing-within the essential sunderance of the clearing of beings. Neither in the creation mentioned before nor in the willing mentioned now do we think of the performance or act of a subject striving toward himself as his self-posited goal.
Willing is the sober unclosedness of that existential self-transcendence which exposes itself to the openness of beings as it is set into the work. In this way, standing-within is brought under law. Preserving the work, as knowing, is a sober standing-within the awesomeness of the truth that is happening in the work.
This knowledge, which as a willing makes its home in the work's truth, and only thus remains a knowing, does not deprive the work
* The word for resoluteness, Entschlossenheit, if taken literally, would mean "unclosedness."— TR.